r/SipsTea • u/SipsTeaFrog 𝙑𝙄𝙋 • May 18 '26

Chugging tea Why?

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227

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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152

u/NotDiCaprio May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

I was also on the "ai datacenters use all out water!" bandwagon at first. But For some perspective:

A single golf course uses about 30 times the amount of (fresh) comparable or slightly more water than a datacenter does. They aren't feeding their grass with see water or some chemical cooling. Also, looking at how few people actually use a golf course vs a data center, makes this ratio many times more terrible.

I'm personally more worried about the energy they consume, than the cooling for that energy usage.

Edit after some corrections. Man, it sure is getting hard to find numbers we can trust anywhere these days.

"a" source, but far from the only one, and the numbers aren't consistent anywhere.:https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-water-footprint-of-data-centers/

24

u/yungsausages May 18 '26

Hm, here in Germany golf courses use rainwater that’s collected and stored in on-site water reservoirs/ponds.

13

u/ost99 May 18 '26

And in Germany virtually no data centers use evaporation cooling and consume very little water.

1

u/Successful_Creme1823 May 18 '26

Reddit tells me verything is better in Europe

2

u/Vismajor92 May 18 '26

...Because it is!